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I don't read reviews about myself with any special eagerness or attention unless they are masterpieces of wit and acumen, and I never reread them.

Vladimir Nabokov

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Vladimir Nabokov
Age: 77 †
Born: 1899
Born: January 1
Died: 1977
Died: January 1
Autobiographer
Chess Composer
Chess Player
Journalist
Lepidopterist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
St. Petersburg
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Vladimir Sirin
Vl. Sirin
Wladimir Nabokoff-Sirin
V. Sirin
Attention
Reread
Read
Masterpieces
Never
Eagerness
Masterpiece
Reviews
Wit
Unless
Special
Acumen

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise--a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames--but still a paradise.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Don't touch me I'll die if you touch me.
Vladimir Nabokov
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The future is but the obsolete in reverse.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique dazzling gift. The gift of James Joyce, and not the talent of Henry James.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries. Oh, Lolita, had you love me thus!
Vladimir Nabokov
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Ideas in modern Russia are machine-cut blocks coming in solid colors the nuance is outlawed, the interval walled up, the curve grossly stepped.
Vladimir Nabokov
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There is the first satisfaction of arranging it on a bit of paper after many, many false tries, false moves, finally you have the sentence you recognize as the one you are looking for.
Vladimir Nabokov
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The square root of I is I.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Do those clowns really believe what they teach?
Vladimir Nabokov
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The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading
Vladimir Nabokov
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Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Why do those people guess so much and shave so little, and are so disdainful of hearing aids?
Vladimir Nabokov
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The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Do not be awed by giant predecessors. Be ill-tempered with their renown. Point out flaws. Frighten interviewers from Time. Appear in Playboy. Sell to the movies.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoievsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.
Vladimir Nabokov
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It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.
Vladimir Nabokov
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There was a time in my demented youth When somehow I suspected that the truth About survival after death was known To every human being: I alone Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy Of books and people hid the truth from me.
Vladimir Nabokov
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There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child.
Vladimir Nabokov
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...and the red sun of desire and decision (the two things that create a live world) rose higher and higher, while upon a succession of balconies a succession of libertines, sparkling glass in hand, toasted the bliss of past and future nights.
Vladimir Nabokov